Love Is Love

On her second full-length album, the Baltimore rapper indulges in the time-honored queer tradition of plotting a great escape from it all.

Lor Choc sings, “What if you and I/Can get away together/Right now?” as her voice intermittently curdles with Auto-Tune. The song, “Get Away,” joins Bronski Beat’s synthpop voyage “Smalltown Boy” and Tracy Chapman’s folk-pop hit “Fast Car” in a lineage of forlorn runaways. In all three, the speaker’s home is little more than an oppressive shell they must break out of on their way to freedom, acceptance, peace. “You and I can both get jobs/And finally see what it means to be living,” Chapman postulates in her earthy alto. Choc’s vision is more tempered: “It’s whatever/I’m just trying to live better.”

The idea that real life hides somewhere just beyond the horizon is not constrained to queer music, but it takes on extra urgency there. Softer and more wistful than Lor Choc’s 2016 debut tape Worth the Wait, Love Is Love finds the artist caught in the liminal space between where she is and where she’s going, between her allegiance to her hometown and the suspicion that somewhere better lies in wait. These love songs come with disclaimers. “I got a girl that really love me/But I’m too caught up in this money/I’m too caught up in these streets,” she muses on “Love Me.” On “Wrong Rights,” she saddles a cliché with additional poignancy: “If loving you is wrong/Then I don’t wanna be right,” she murmurs against a spat of ultra-compressed synth strings. Because she’s singing to another woman, the tired couplet wakes up. If the world stamps her love as morally wrong, then fuck the world, let’s find a better one.

Compared to the exuberant mosaic of Worth the Wait, Love Is Love’s production rings a little sedate. Hi-hats fall like snowflakes, and synth riffs chirp tinny and thin. Choc steps in to fill the space that’s been left open, proving herself a versatile and charismatic presence behind the mic. She can play tender, as on the gently tuneful “Vibe,” and she can wail up a storm like she does on “How I Feel.” Whether she’s nursing a crush or self-soothing after a bad breakup, she doesn’t hesitate to push her voice to its natural breaking point, often rippling it with filters for additional emphasis.

In the years leading up to the 2015 Supreme Court ruling that legalized gay marriage across the United States, “all love is equal” was used as one of many slogans in support of LGBTQ rights. After the 2016 mass shooting at the Orlando gay club Pulse, Lin-Manuel Miranda read a sonnet at the Tony Awards that condensed the sentiment to “love is love.” It’s legal now to marry anyone, but such a law hardly ensures the safety of queer folks figuring out how to negotiate a deeply heteronormative world. Laws don’t tell stories, and there are still yawning gaps in the ongoing history of queer storytelling. There’s no hard script for relationships that diverge from straight coupling, which is both confusing and exciting: It means you get to write your own. Lor Choc, a young artist with a sharp curiosity around her craft, sets out to do just that — to turn the relative vacancy around her experience into an opportunity for forging something new.

In Choc’s vision, the intimacies of female friendship coalesce into a romantic bond between equals. “They be mad cause we be fussin’/And we still be clique-tight,” she raps on “Ride.” “Don’t be scared to tell me nothing/Secret’s safe on this side.” They’re sharing secrets, close like best friends, and they’re also in love like girls aren’t supposed to be. “Tell me you’ll never leave me,” Choc sings at the hook. It’s not possessiveness; it’s a wild, gleaming hope.